[nFBMI-Talk] Critical To Read "The Braille Monitor" January 2018 Edition

[Kane Brolin]

Happy new year.

At this morning's Michiana Chapter meeting, we listened to President
Riccobono's January Presidential Release, recorded just after the
start of the new year.

Near the end, he points out that the January, 2018 issue of our
flagship publication "The Braille Monitor" deals at quite some length
with the accreditation of agencies and programs that claim to
represent and teach blind people--something that sounds really good,
but that often turns out to be detrimental to us, since such agencies
and programs and the orgs which accredit them are not made up of blind
people.  They are dominated by sighted professionals who say they know
what is good for us but who are not really us. .

I was not an active part of the organized blind movement in the 1980s.
But those who were involved, will remember that the NFB spent years
fighting hard against the National Accreditation Council, known by the
acronym NAC.  As it turns out, we did a great job of neutralizing NAC,
but we did not utterly destroy it.  Now, NAC is back, and others who
practice a philosophy similar to NAC's, are threatening once again to
weaken the organized blind movement.  Of critical importance is the
article that President Riccobono himself has written: "Ending
Accreditation without Authenticity: A Call to Action for the Fourth
Generation of the Federation."
https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm18/bm1801/bm180102.htm

Among other things, President Riccobono asserts that it is the
Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually
Impaired (AERBVI) who are playing a big role in the resurgence of NAC.
https://aerbvi.org/the-national-accreditation-council/ For any among
us who has a Twitter account, President Riccobono calls on us to
address @AERBVI in our tweets and to use the hash tag GoodbyeNAC.  I
have done this, on behalf of my chapter and through my own personal
Twitter account as well.  It is needed for us to make our numerous
voices heard as we point out cryptically but strongly that we as blind
consumers are not willing to sit back and let sighted experts in
educational protocol dictate what is and is not good for us.  In other
words, nothing about us, without us.

Mr. Riccobono's Presidential Release is found at
https://nfb.org/presidential-releases.

Many thanks to Gary Wunder for putting these thoughts together and
publishing them for all of us.  Enjoy.

Kind regards,

-Kane